There are so many things wrong with your post, Im not actually sure youve ever had to deal with MS licensing - my experience (mid-sized corporation of about 120 desks, up to a year or so ago) is completely in contrast to yours.
I had no problems at all getting an Open Value license agreement for my initial 10 Windows licenses with SA, and these were full, complete and perpetual licenses - at no time was I offered "upgrade only" or limited time licenses. I paid about £45 per license, plus £4 for the Software Assurance.
I also had no problems getting both Dell and HP to sell me both server and workstations without an OEM Windows license - again, my initial batch was 10 PCs from Dell that cost about £350 each, and they had no problems giving me a blank workstation with no Windows license at all (and the machine was cheaper than the quote with a Windows license, so they werent just selling them to us and not giving us the license).
Also it sounds like you are discussing the Microsoft Select Site Agreement, and ignoring the other options Microsoft have when it comes to licensing - of *course* when you are discussing a *SITE* license, they want to know how many systems are in your licensed *SITE*. Thats the point of a site license - you are licensing *everything*.
If you go for an Open Value agreement (the smallest enterprise license MS offer), you can buy Windows, Office, SQL Server, CALs, whatever on an individual basis - my first OV license was for 10 Windows licenses, but my predecessor had held OV agreements for as little as one copy of Office 2003. If you bump this up to a Microsoft Select agreement, then you get better value the more licenses you buy - Class A, B or C. I didn't have to license the entire company, or every desktop, just what we wanted to license.
We also had no problems licensing just 80 of the systems for Office under the Open Subscription scheme - annual payments, with built-in SA, cost us about £38 a license per year. No requirement to license the entire corporation, no issues with annual payments - and this particular batch of licensing was competed for between three of our suppliers (our LARs and two of our normal business suppliers with LARs of their own), with all agreeing on the terms so its not as if our LARs cocked up.
So, my experience in an actual corporate environment was completely the opposite of yours. The Large Account Reseller I was dealing with was called SoftCat and they were wonderfully helpful.
I have no idea where you got your experience, but your post does Microsoft Licensing a huge disservice because your post is pretty much wrong in every aspect.
Your definition of a tax is outdated - a tax is defined as whatever the government say it is.
The BBC License Fee was reclassified as a tax in 2006 by the Office of National Statistics, and has been treated as one by the Government and the BBC ever since.
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
In the last license fee review, the BBC was given responsibility for funding the World Service, S4C and BBC Monitoring, as well as providing funding for setting up local TV services and various other schemes - all while the license fee was held at its current rate. In other words, the Government offloaded a load of its own expenditure onto the BBC without increasing the BBCs funding, meaning that not only do the Government save its own money, it forces the BBC to reduce costs.
So yes, while the BBC is separately funded, that doesn't mean that it doesn't get screwed by the government and forced to carry out its own cost savings measures...
I don't recall OpenOffice.org development being exactly speedy prior to the acquisition, and Gosling mentioned that the Google/Android issue was already well in the minds of executives before the acquisition, so I wouldn't exactly be quick to blame Oracle for ticking off the FLOSS guys.
I'm on the side of being able to do what you want with the device, but to play devils advocate to your post means I have to suggest that no, contracts do not make lock-downs a moot point - its been well established that there are plenty of people here on Slashdot that don't care one iota for hte limits the contract places on your usage.
Take tethering for example - data usage patterns varies wildly depending on whether you are using the data on the device itself, or via a connected PC (it really does, I logged my own usage of both for a week and was surprised). The problem is, there are a lot of vocal posters who take the stance of "well, I paid for 'data', I should be able to use it any which way I damn well please" and a contract isn't going to stop them refusing to pay the tethering charge... Should the phone company just charge the higher rate for the more intensive usage patterns to everyone?
Thats not a malformed URL, its a perfectly valid one - the trailing dot makes the domain a fully qualified one under RFC 1738. Its your filter program that is the faulty one here.
And yet again we have someone complaining about the law firms potential payout - they are the ones taking the financial risk here, if you want a better settlement then opt out and do it yourself, but be prepared to pay legal fees along the way.
No purpose whatsoever? I disagree - by using their own domain they can ensure completely the function of the uri used, rather than relying on third parties providing continuous availability, and they can also place some information at the uri regarding the usage of the uri within the required context.
So one is a moral issue, while the other is not. Nice - you have just separated the two based on your own beliefs and morals.
You still aren't grasping the basic facts of the issue here - teaching evolution, no matter how correct or factual it is, can still get teachers into a lot of shit. Why should they be forced to take that shit for you?
Abortion is not a moral issue at all, its the simple disposal of the feotus within the female - its an easy and quick medical procedure. *We* make it an issue, just the same as the religious groups make evolution an issue - some people disagree with abortion and thus it becomes something that is difficult to teach, and the same is becoming true for evolution. You don't make teachers teach about abortion, so why make them teach other difficult subjects?
Im not equating it with anything, Im saying that if there is a real credible reason for the teacher not to teach it (and loss of job or threats against their person most certainly is a credible reason) then they shouldn't be made to teach it.
Would you advocate that a teacher should be forced to tell the sex ed class that abortion is an equally valid method of birth control? Or should they be allowed to not cover something thats going to get them killed?
Why should the teachers "grow some balls"? Seriously, they are there to teach, not to get into some great philisophical debate which can have very real and permanent repercussions for them and their careers - the debate is for the public and the politicians to get into and sort out, not for the class room.
Like it or not, a lot of people have very real issues with evolution (I am not one of them), and those issues can extend to causing problems for those willing to teach their kids.
Refusing to teach it because of the political and ideological issues surrounding the debate is most certainly a valid stance for a teacher to take - a teacher shouldnt have to put up with hate mail or threats or harrassment any more than the rest of us. By forcing them to teach it, you are forcing them to open themselves up to attack.
If you want your kids to be taught about evolution so desperately, run your own little class on saturdays (or even sundays). Take the debate on yourself.
Forensic traces at a crime scene dont have to swear an oath either, and they can be used in court as evidence - you seem to be misconstruing testimony and evidence.
Its quite simple - if the network in question can provide enough information to suggest "this account posted this text on this date from this address" and the lawyers can provide enough corroborating evidence to allow a reasonable person to accept that as a truth, then its good enough to be used in a court. If you dont want it used, dont post it - or dont allow a third party to hold it.
The recipients in that case have an advantage - they know that theres a protocol being followed, and they may even know the inner details of that protocol. In the challenge posted above, you wouldn't even know theres a protocol, let alone anything about it. All the testing website does is certify that a given message conforms to the protocol.
In the above challenge, the equivilent is handing the entire encoded message to someone with no prior knowledge of the protocol, and having them successfully decode and understand it. They may be able to infer that there is a protocol being used by the fact that there is a structure to the information, but that may not be immediately obvious nor easily detected - think of the excitement that quasars created in astronomy until someone discovered they were just stars giving out radio pulses that just happened to be regular and artificial looking.
Only if the cheater label was made public by Microsoft - was it? If it's a private label applied to just the views the account holder can see, then there is no case to be made. I'm not sure how MS applies the label.
Pretty sure libel or slander has to be done in public to be pursuable - does Xbox Live make your status in these circumstances public or just to the account holder? If it's just the account holder then they have no case.
With cash, the business most certainly has third party charges in a lot of cases - if its a large business (department store) then they more than likely have daily or weekly cash drops and pickups by armoured car rather than someone running down to the bank, then theres the added time for reconciliation of cash registers against receipts, someone has to do that at the end of the day and thats added wages (its instant with EFT, there is nothing to count), most business banking accounts have cash handling charges as well (for payment in and for change supply).
Don't kid yourself that cash is free for a business, its actually quite costly, and for larger businesses it can be more costly than EFT.
I'd say the rule in question would not allow the ISP to unilaterally decide to cut off DDoS traffic to one user, but if the user directs them to stop the traffic then it's fine. Net neutrality is about who makes decisions on traffic, not whether decisions are allowed to be made.
Also, what happens if one member of Anonymous decides to play the sacrificial goat and say "We all hate Comcast, DDoS me! Theres nothing they can do to prevent it!" and never take any mitigating action? Are you seriously saying that Comcast should have no ability to act in such a case?
If you take the ability to make such a decision out of the hands of the service provider, then you most certainly put them in a dangerous position.
Again, a nice demonstration of the inability for "simple" one line rules to deal effectively with the reality of the situation.
When the DDoS affects more than the single user, you can bet your arse I support the decision of an ISP over that of an end user - in the case I give above, there is absolutely no chance of an end user on ADSL from being able to handle 10GB/sec, but that sort of abnormal traffic can have a negative effect on the ISP, so what happens when the end user either doesn't care or simply doesn't notice (because they are away for example)? Does the ISP have to bear the brunt? Because thats what the rule states....
I'm not interpreting the rule harshly, I'm interpreting it as it is written - the ISP cannot make decisions based on the traffic, it has to make a best effort to deliver it. If the IP is unused, then I would allow for the interpretation that its not meant to be delivered to a subscriber and thus can be dropped at a boundary (according to the written rule), but when the IP is in use...?
I also disagree with your comment about billing issues - net neutrality would only apply to the service, if the service is no longer being paid for then the service doesn't have to be offered - net neutrality doesn't get a look in. Even thus so, based on the rule mentioned earlier, the decision to cease service would not be based on the traffic and thus would not fall foul of the rule.
I think you are misinterpreting the posts here as being against net neutrality - they aren't. They are demonstrating that simple one line catch all rules are stupid and unworkable without extensive clarification, exclusions and clauses. One line catch all rules rapidly result in negative unintended consequences.
Both mine and my wifes came in the original Nokia packaging (black box) and neither had a screen protector nor case - the screen was scratched just through normal usage, it has its own little pocket in her handbag so it wasn't being scratched by anything else.
I'm not talking about huge gouges, just small scratches which are visible and cannot be cleaned off.
Currently, packets get dropped wherever the backlog builds up to the point where timeouts exceed queue clearing time, which starts at the ISP end of the ADSL line and gradually works its way back through the ISPs infrastructure and across the transit providers infrastructures depending on how large the DDoS is.
And currently, once an attack is identified, the ISPs work together to drop the packets deliberately at the point where it would make the most difference, and then work back from that (so they would drop the packets on the other side of the choke points, where they would get the most traffic in one hit, and then eliminate the remaining in smaller and smaller efforts).
However, the rule in question would forbid the ISPs from doing this, since they are not allowed to discriminate at any time or for any reason, so they have to allow the DDoS traffic through.
Allowing the ADSL user to switch IPs solves the issue for the user, but it doesn't solve the issue for the ISP - they still have to handle all that traffic, they cannot block it due to the rule, and that will affect their infrastructure for the duration.
And that is why the rule as given is broken - it is uncompromising to the point where that position can easily cause harm.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't know if Postal III is any good yet....
Out of interest, how many torrents end up on a cd-r or DVD-r? I haven't personally bought a spindle in 5 years, or burned a DVD in the last year.
There are so many things wrong with your post, Im not actually sure youve ever had to deal with MS licensing - my experience (mid-sized corporation of about 120 desks, up to a year or so ago) is completely in contrast to yours.
I had no problems at all getting an Open Value license agreement for my initial 10 Windows licenses with SA, and these were full, complete and perpetual licenses - at no time was I offered "upgrade only" or limited time licenses. I paid about £45 per license, plus £4 for the Software Assurance.
I also had no problems getting both Dell and HP to sell me both server and workstations without an OEM Windows license - again, my initial batch was 10 PCs from Dell that cost about £350 each, and they had no problems giving me a blank workstation with no Windows license at all (and the machine was cheaper than the quote with a Windows license, so they werent just selling them to us and not giving us the license).
Also it sounds like you are discussing the Microsoft Select Site Agreement, and ignoring the other options Microsoft have when it comes to licensing - of *course* when you are discussing a *SITE* license, they want to know how many systems are in your licensed *SITE*. Thats the point of a site license - you are licensing *everything*.
If you go for an Open Value agreement (the smallest enterprise license MS offer), you can buy Windows, Office, SQL Server, CALs, whatever on an individual basis - my first OV license was for 10 Windows licenses, but my predecessor had held OV agreements for as little as one copy of Office 2003. If you bump this up to a Microsoft Select agreement, then you get better value the more licenses you buy - Class A, B or C. I didn't have to license the entire company, or every desktop, just what we wanted to license.
We also had no problems licensing just 80 of the systems for Office under the Open Subscription scheme - annual payments, with built-in SA, cost us about £38 a license per year. No requirement to license the entire corporation, no issues with annual payments - and this particular batch of licensing was competed for between three of our suppliers (our LARs and two of our normal business suppliers with LARs of their own), with all agreeing on the terms so its not as if our LARs cocked up.
So, my experience in an actual corporate environment was completely the opposite of yours. The Large Account Reseller I was dealing with was called SoftCat and they were wonderfully helpful.
I have no idea where you got your experience, but your post does Microsoft Licensing a huge disservice because your post is pretty much wrong in every aspect.
Your definition of a tax is outdated - a tax is defined as whatever the government say it is.
The BBC License Fee was reclassified as a tax in 2006 by the Office of National Statistics, and has been treated as one by the Government and the BBC ever since.
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
In the last license fee review, the BBC was given responsibility for funding the World Service, S4C and BBC Monitoring, as well as providing funding for setting up local TV services and various other schemes - all while the license fee was held at its current rate. In other words, the Government offloaded a load of its own expenditure onto the BBC without increasing the BBCs funding, meaning that not only do the Government save its own money, it forces the BBC to reduce costs.
So yes, while the BBC is separately funded, that doesn't mean that it doesn't get screwed by the government and forced to carry out its own cost savings measures...
I don't recall OpenOffice.org development being exactly speedy prior to the acquisition, and Gosling mentioned that the Google/Android issue was already well in the minds of executives before the acquisition, so I wouldn't exactly be quick to blame Oracle for ticking off the FLOSS guys.
I'm on the side of being able to do what you want with the device, but to play devils advocate to your post means I have to suggest that no, contracts do not make lock-downs a moot point - its been well established that there are plenty of people here on Slashdot that don't care one iota for hte limits the contract places on your usage.
Take tethering for example - data usage patterns varies wildly depending on whether you are using the data on the device itself, or via a connected PC (it really does, I logged my own usage of both for a week and was surprised). The problem is, there are a lot of vocal posters who take the stance of "well, I paid for 'data', I should be able to use it any which way I damn well please" and a contract isn't going to stop them refusing to pay the tethering charge... Should the phone company just charge the higher rate for the more intensive usage patterns to everyone?
Thats not a malformed URL, its a perfectly valid one - the trailing dot makes the domain a fully qualified one under RFC 1738. Its your filter program that is the faulty one here.
Yup, they are most certainly not working on IE9 at the moment, and they have most certainly not released several promising betas...
And yet again we have someone complaining about the law firms potential payout - they are the ones taking the financial risk here, if you want a better settlement then opt out and do it yourself, but be prepared to pay legal fees along the way.
As a British web developer, the FTC does not regulate me...
Every browser in the world can support it, it means nothing if the websites do not honour it - and what reason do they have to honour it?
No purpose whatsoever? I disagree - by using their own domain they can ensure completely the function of the uri used, rather than relying on third parties providing continuous availability, and they can also place some information at the uri regarding the usage of the uri within the required context.
I think thats three very useful purposes.
So one is a moral issue, while the other is not. Nice - you have just separated the two based on your own beliefs and morals.
You still aren't grasping the basic facts of the issue here - teaching evolution, no matter how correct or factual it is, can still get teachers into a lot of shit. Why should they be forced to take that shit for you?
Abortion is not a moral issue at all, its the simple disposal of the feotus within the female - its an easy and quick medical procedure. *We* make it an issue, just the same as the religious groups make evolution an issue - some people disagree with abortion and thus it becomes something that is difficult to teach, and the same is becoming true for evolution. You don't make teachers teach about abortion, so why make them teach other difficult subjects?
Im not equating it with anything, Im saying that if there is a real credible reason for the teacher not to teach it (and loss of job or threats against their person most certainly is a credible reason) then they shouldn't be made to teach it.
Would you advocate that a teacher should be forced to tell the sex ed class that abortion is an equally valid method of birth control? Or should they be allowed to not cover something thats going to get them killed?
Why should the teachers "grow some balls"? Seriously, they are there to teach, not to get into some great philisophical debate which can have very real and permanent repercussions for them and their careers - the debate is for the public and the politicians to get into and sort out, not for the class room.
Like it or not, a lot of people have very real issues with evolution (I am not one of them), and those issues can extend to causing problems for those willing to teach their kids.
Refusing to teach it because of the political and ideological issues surrounding the debate is most certainly a valid stance for a teacher to take - a teacher shouldnt have to put up with hate mail or threats or harrassment any more than the rest of us. By forcing them to teach it, you are forcing them to open themselves up to attack.
If you want your kids to be taught about evolution so desperately, run your own little class on saturdays (or even sundays). Take the debate on yourself.
Forensic traces at a crime scene dont have to swear an oath either, and they can be used in court as evidence - you seem to be misconstruing testimony and evidence.
Its quite simple - if the network in question can provide enough information to suggest "this account posted this text on this date from this address" and the lawyers can provide enough corroborating evidence to allow a reasonable person to accept that as a truth, then its good enough to be used in a court. If you dont want it used, dont post it - or dont allow a third party to hold it.
The recipients in that case have an advantage - they know that theres a protocol being followed, and they may even know the inner details of that protocol. In the challenge posted above, you wouldn't even know theres a protocol, let alone anything about it. All the testing website does is certify that a given message conforms to the protocol.
In the above challenge, the equivilent is handing the entire encoded message to someone with no prior knowledge of the protocol, and having them successfully decode and understand it. They may be able to infer that there is a protocol being used by the fact that there is a structure to the information, but that may not be immediately obvious nor easily detected - think of the excitement that quasars created in astronomy until someone discovered they were just stars giving out radio pulses that just happened to be regular and artificial looking.
Only if the cheater label was made public by Microsoft - was it? If it's a private label applied to just the views the account holder can see, then there is no case to be made. I'm not sure how MS applies the label.
Pretty sure libel or slander has to be done in public to be pursuable - does Xbox Live make your status in these circumstances public or just to the account holder? If it's just the account holder then they have no case.
With cash, the business most certainly has third party charges in a lot of cases - if its a large business (department store) then they more than likely have daily or weekly cash drops and pickups by armoured car rather than someone running down to the bank, then theres the added time for reconciliation of cash registers against receipts, someone has to do that at the end of the day and thats added wages (its instant with EFT, there is nothing to count), most business banking accounts have cash handling charges as well (for payment in and for change supply).
Don't kid yourself that cash is free for a business, its actually quite costly, and for larger businesses it can be more costly than EFT.
I'd say the rule in question would not allow the ISP to unilaterally decide to cut off DDoS traffic to one user, but if the user directs them to stop the traffic then it's fine. Net neutrality is about who makes decisions on traffic, not whether decisions are allowed to be made.
Also, what happens if one member of Anonymous decides to play the sacrificial goat and say "We all hate Comcast, DDoS me! Theres nothing they can do to prevent it!" and never take any mitigating action? Are you seriously saying that Comcast should have no ability to act in such a case?
If you take the ability to make such a decision out of the hands of the service provider, then you most certainly put them in a dangerous position.
Again, a nice demonstration of the inability for "simple" one line rules to deal effectively with the reality of the situation.
When the DDoS affects more than the single user, you can bet your arse I support the decision of an ISP over that of an end user - in the case I give above, there is absolutely no chance of an end user on ADSL from being able to handle 10GB/sec, but that sort of abnormal traffic can have a negative effect on the ISP, so what happens when the end user either doesn't care or simply doesn't notice (because they are away for example)? Does the ISP have to bear the brunt? Because thats what the rule states....
I'm not interpreting the rule harshly, I'm interpreting it as it is written - the ISP cannot make decisions based on the traffic, it has to make a best effort to deliver it. If the IP is unused, then I would allow for the interpretation that its not meant to be delivered to a subscriber and thus can be dropped at a boundary (according to the written rule), but when the IP is in use...?
I also disagree with your comment about billing issues - net neutrality would only apply to the service, if the service is no longer being paid for then the service doesn't have to be offered - net neutrality doesn't get a look in. Even thus so, based on the rule mentioned earlier, the decision to cease service would not be based on the traffic and thus would not fall foul of the rule.
I think you are misinterpreting the posts here as being against net neutrality - they aren't. They are demonstrating that simple one line catch all rules are stupid and unworkable without extensive clarification, exclusions and clauses. One line catch all rules rapidly result in negative unintended consequences.
Both mine and my wifes came in the original Nokia packaging (black box) and neither had a screen protector nor case - the screen was scratched just through normal usage, it has its own little pocket in her handbag so it wasn't being scratched by anything else.
I'm not talking about huge gouges, just small scratches which are visible and cannot be cleaned off.
Currently, packets get dropped wherever the backlog builds up to the point where timeouts exceed queue clearing time, which starts at the ISP end of the ADSL line and gradually works its way back through the ISPs infrastructure and across the transit providers infrastructures depending on how large the DDoS is.
And currently, once an attack is identified, the ISPs work together to drop the packets deliberately at the point where it would make the most difference, and then work back from that (so they would drop the packets on the other side of the choke points, where they would get the most traffic in one hit, and then eliminate the remaining in smaller and smaller efforts).
However, the rule in question would forbid the ISPs from doing this, since they are not allowed to discriminate at any time or for any reason, so they have to allow the DDoS traffic through.
Allowing the ADSL user to switch IPs solves the issue for the user, but it doesn't solve the issue for the ISP - they still have to handle all that traffic, they cannot block it due to the rule, and that will affect their infrastructure for the duration.
And that is why the rule as given is broken - it is uncompromising to the point where that position can easily cause harm.